dive down into the ground and bring up sand in their claws, have discovered symptoms that the world was at one time sick to its stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds of rocks and things, and there is a probability that lead ore may be discovered.  This will be valuable to make bullets in case of a war with Oshkosh.  In peace it is always best to prepare for war, and I trust you will lend your countenance to the able men who are investigating the Lower Silurian age.

FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.

Reports from the stationers show that there is no demand at all for the revised edition of the Bible, and had it not been for the newspapers publishing the whole affair there would have been very few persons that took the trouble to even glance at it, and it is believed that not one reader of the daily papers in a hundred read any of the Bible, and not one in ten thousand read all of it which was published.  Who originated this scheme of revising the Bible we do not know, but whoever it was made a miscue.  There was no one suffering particularly for a revision of the Bible.  It was good enough as it was.  No literary sharp of the present day has got any license to change anything in the Bible.

Why, the cheeky ghouls have actually altered over the Lord’s Prayer, cut it biased, and thrown the parts about giving us this day our daily bread into the rag bag.  How do they know that the Lord said more than he wanted to in that prayer?  He wanted that daily bread in there, or He never would have put it in.  The only wonder is that those revisers did not insert strawberry shortcake and ice cream in place of daily bread.  Some of these ministers who are writing speeches for the Lord think they are smart.  They have fooled with Christ’s sermon on the Mount until He couldn’t tell it if He was to meet it in the Chicago Times.

This thing has gone on long enough, and we want a stop put to it.  We have kept still about the piracy that has been going on in the Bible because people who are better than we are have seemed to endorse it, but now we are sick of it, and if there is going to be an annual clerical picnic to cut gashes in the Bible and stick new precepts and examples on where they will do the most hurt, we shall lock up our old Bible where the critters can’t get at it and throw the first book agent down stairs head first that tries to shove off on to us one of these new-fangled, go-as-you-please Bibles, with all the modern improvements, and hell left out.

Now, where was there a popular demand to have hell left out of the Bible?  Were there any petitions from the people sent up to this self-constituted legislature of pinchbeck ministers, praying to have hell abolished, and “hades” inserted?  Not a petition.  And what is this hades?  Where is it?  Nobody knows.  They have taken away our orthodox hell, that has stood by us since we first went to Sunday school, and given us a hades.  Half of us wouldn’t know a hades if we should see it dead in the road, but they couldn’t fool us any on hell.